A version of this essay on Crèvecoeur was first presented in Washington
D.C. in 1968 at a symposium to celebrate the opening of the National Portrait
Gallery. It appeared in its present form in 1975, for the British Journal of
American Studies. Three years later I abridged the two Crèvecoeur
collections, Letters and Sketches, in one volume for the Folio Society, as The
Divided Loyalist: Crèvecoeur's America ( London, 1978), with an introduction.
European and American scholars, literary and historical, devoted
considerable attention to Crèvecoeur in the 1980s, though not always with
a full awareness of one another's work. "St. John de Crèvecoeur in the
Looking Glass: Letters from an American Farmer and the Making of a Man
of Letters," ( Early American Literature 19 ( 1984): 173-90), by
Bernard Chevignard , is a good example. Other essays by him, in French, are listed
in his helpful bibliography, which also draws attention to the article on Crèvecoeur by A. W. Plumstead in "American Literature, 1764-1789", ed. Everett Emerson ( Madison: Univeristy of Wisconsin Press, 1977), 213-31. Everett Emerson is the author of "Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur and the
Promise of America," in Forms and Functions of History in American
Literature: Essays in Honor of Ursula Brumm, ed.
Winfried Fluck ( Berlin: Erich Schmidt Verlag, 1981), 44-55; and he has been engaged in work on
Crèecoeur manuscripts acquired in the 1980s by the Library of Congress.
There are interesting ethnic speculations in Moses Rischin, "Creating
Crèvecoeur's 'New Man': He Had a Dream," Journal of American Ethnic
History 1 ( 1981): 26-42. On Crèvecoeur within the context of perceptual
geography see Robert Lawson-Peebles, Landscape and Written Expression
in Revolutionary America ( Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University
Press, 1988), 100-109. A few fresh biographical details are offered in Gay Wilson Allen
and
Roger Asselineau, St. John de Crèvecoeur. The Life of anAmerican Farmer

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